Mario + Rabbids Kingdom Battle is a tactical RPG for the Nintendo Switch. An early title for the Switch developed by Ubisoft, Kingdom Battle places you in a mashed up world of the Rabbids and Mushroom Kingdom, and lends you control over Mario and friends, as well as some Rabbid friends doing their best imitations of their Mushroom Kingdom counterparts, as you attempt to right the world to its proper state.
The gameplay is fun and engaging, but not always balanced the best. Similar to other tactical RPGs, you command each unit during his or her turn on a grid, and attack or trigger abilities as needed to turn the tide of battle in your favor. The balance issues stem from a variety of issues, but the single greatest issue is the tremendous reliance you'll place on luck to carry you through missions. In games like Fire Emblem or Final Fantasy Tactics, hit percentages will be in the 80-90% zone for most abilities and attacks, making your choices more about ensuring that you're not venturing out too far for kills and control of more territory. In Kingdom Battle, however, your hit rates will either be 0%, 50%, or 100%, depending on your position and the amount of cover your opponent has. This is compounded by the fact that each weapon has a random chance of triggering a game-changing status effect on your opponents, and some of these random chances are as low as 30%! Unfortunately, triggering these status effects proves essential to clearing some of the missions, so you're really just rolling the dice on these sometimes, which seems inimical to the "tactical" nature of the genre. I tried a mission, got wiped, tried again and got a bit luckier with status effects, and basically cleared the impossible mission unscathed. There are ways to rig the scales in your favor, but most of these are later in the game when you've more fully developed your characters, and some players may quit in frustration before that point (I know my kids did).
There is plenty of fun to be had here, though, and the good far outweighs the bad. The game gives you a tremendous amount of control over customizing your characters actions in comparison to some of their more traditional tactical RPG cousins, and that opens wide ranges of gameplay options that you just can't find in the competition. For example, in a game like Fire Emblem, each character gets a distinct turn with a movement first and then an action (attack or an ability). Attack first, and you can't move, and if you move out of attack range, you can't attack! In Mario Rabbids, each character gets a "turn" that can be ordered in any way you want. Want to unleash your ability and then run away? Feel free! Want to move and then attack? Go ahead! Want to move, attack, and use an ability in a single turn? Go hog wild! Perhaps more impressively than this is the back and forth nature of the tactics, which allows you to go back and forth between character actions to create the perfect strategy. To give an example, you can move Luigi into a sniping position and trigger his ability, which will cause him to fire a shot at an enemy as soon as they move into view. Then, you can have Mario fire his weapon, which has a 50% chance of bouncing an enemy into the air. Upon that successful bounce, Luigi will automatically fire at the bouncing enemy. Upon the enemy landing, Luigi (who still has not technically used his "attack" command, can now attack them at will, despite the fact that he's already moved and used an ability, and someone else has already taken some actions of their own. This opens up a huge world of strategic interactions and gameplay that allows you to totally customize your experience and play style to your liking.
The character development system is a little shallow, but still fun. You have an upgrade tree that requires you to purchase new skills using orbs unlocked from winning battles, and these skills can get pretty outrageous, at times. For example, Luigi's skill that has him automatically firing at moving enemies can be upgraded so that it will trigger two, or even three times following its activation! The game also allows you to re-spec your skill tree whenever you want, allowing you to experiment with different builds and strategies, depending on the level. It does get a bit tiring needing to respect after basically every level (yes, this is mostly necessary), but having the option to do so is a nice touch. There are only about 15 different skills, however, so you'll mostly just be upgrading these to higher levels. It's not as deep as a game like Final Fantasy Tactics, but the depth of the tactical gameplay makes up for it.
The game's graphics are really nice, with a good merging of the Rabbids and Mario universes into one cohesive style. As you move through the world, you'll find artifacts of the Rabbids world strewn throughout the Mushroom Kingdom, and witness the contentious Rabbids squabbling with each other off to the side.
The music is...ok. It is immediately recognizable as a Grant Kirkhope effort (famous for Banjo-Kazooie and Donkey Kong 64), and there are touches of nostalgia here and there for fans of those classic games. But they just hue too closely to the themes and approaches from these games to be novel, and boy do I hope you like to hear the same instruments arranged for the same purposes as in his previous work.
On the whole, I very much enjoyed this game. There are a few areas that need some improvement, but it's a great deal of fun set in a colorful and imaginative universe, and it's really a must own for Switch owners who are fans of the genre. I'll give it an 8.9/10.
Up next on What I'm Playing is another run through a sports title, so stay tuned! Here's a teaser...
-TRO
No comments:
Post a Comment